Friday 6 November 2009 19.11 EST
First published on Friday 6 November 2009 19.11 EST

This England rugby camp would flummox a Twickenham regular returning from a long tour of space. There is a young wing called Matt Banahan whose tattoos include half a Spitfire (his brother sports the other half) and falling bombs; Steve Thompson is back from retirement and the alehouse to resume at hooker and "trust" has replaced "interactive rugby" and "fronting up" as this season's buzz phrase.

In a game of "gym monkeys", as the recuperating lock Simon Shaw describes it, the roll call of absent stars says that mutually assured destruction is the aspiration in a collision-obsessed age. But just as you are contemplating the Blitz aesthetic of Banahan's body art, a door opens and the gilded aura of a saviour swings down the hall. Injury chaos is the backdrop to today's return of the king.

If equanimity is England's response to losing 13 players from the squad to face Australia, it must be because Jonny Wilkinson is back in town. As Shaw says in his book, The Hard Yards: My Story, "There is a comfort-blanket feeling when Jonny is in the side. It's not that he will do anything terribly flash, it's just the bits and pieces he can produce that keep everything ticking over."

The new weapon is Wilkinson at No10 and the expressive but non-combative Shane Geraghty at No12. In his fourth England appearance, Geraghty says his job is "to bring good balance to the team, to take some of the load off Jonny's shoulders, to spread responsibility between myself and Jonny, to interchange throughout the game to keep the opposition guessing as to who's the first receiver, to add to him in terms of moves."

With joint quarterbacks England can slide Wilkinson back into international duties without the onerous Messiah role he has carted through his 10 years at the top. But the Twickenham crowd are unlikely to see the pairing as a collective. Repeating this week's mantra, Wilkinson said: "I think rugby's about trust. It's a huge, huge part of the game – and one of the honest values of it." The crowd have their own trust. They will trust Jonny to put Australia to flight.

England are a team in search of an identity, a style of playing, a guiding ethos. It was always thus. A decade back, Clive Woodward hired Brian Ashton to inject fizz into the back play but then fell back on the old brutalism of forward attrition.

Historically, England will try to beat you by beating you up. In his ruminations on last autumn's Twickenham internationals – in which England leaked 102 points to Australia, South Africa and New Zealand – Shaw cast light on the conflict between an urge to play expansive rugby and the old failsafe of slash and burn. "Having banged on about the need for change, it probably sounds a bit daft to say that I now felt it was just too much too soon," Shaw says of Johnson's fiery induction this time last year.

Today's game extends the theme of personnel churn and conjecture about whether England should be winning games by any means necessary or reconstructing for a World Cup only two years away. Wilkinson has been absent from this confused landscape since he jogged on as a replacement to play the junior partner to Danny Cipriani in the last match of the 2008 Six Nations. His return restores the certainty of order and control: England's deepest craving, still.

"There is no such thing as good players. There are just good teams who allow players to be good," Wilkinson says, contradicting everything we know about individual, game-changing talent. Here, as further evidence of England's true nature, is Wilkinson on what he feels when he sees an Australia shirt: "I always think of a certain professionalism, but I also think of what I consider a major strength of Australia, which is that they always seem to be able to tactically work better than any other team."

This is not ticket-selling talk. But he is a ticket-selling talent who conforms to a deep notion of what the English imagine themselves to be, minus the monologues. Since he struck the drop-goal that was heard around the globe in the 2003 World Cup final in Sydney, England's cricketers have won two Ashes series and lost a third 5-0. Against all medical odds, that past has reconstituted itself just as the Johnson regime is entering its critical, post-honeymoon phase.

First, the statistical miracle. Wilkinson has registered 1,032 points for England. Way back in his slipstream are Paul Grayson with 400 and Rob Andrew on 396. But his try-count in 70 internationals? Six, or 30 points out of 1,032 (210 penalties, 144 conversions, 28 drop goals).

An all-Leicester back-row for today's contest is the best emblem of Johnsonian control. But behind the scrum the Australian attack coach Brian Smith has instilled a southern hemisphere five-eights format that invites Wilkinson and Geraghty to interchange as first receivers at fly-half and inside centre.

"Smithy's motto," according to Geraghty, is "feed the speed" of Ugo Monye and Mark Cueto. The heavy Leicester influence of Johnson and his staff meets its resistance in Ashton's successor as minister for fun. Geraghty says: "Smithy's always there, fighting his corner. I'm still the guy who thinks things should be tried. But I like to calculate a risk."

But the risk-taker remains an international greenhorn. Wilkinson gave that game away when discussing his former England partnership with Mike Catt. "It's massively helpful to be out there with people who've been put in positions of responsibility over and over again, because there's just a way of looking at the game when you've had that experience.

"The more the onus has been put on you, the wider the picture in your head. In the middle of the game you can step back out of that frantic bubble and see what's really happening. I had that with Mike Catt, hugely. Shane seems to have that instinctively. He was with Mike Catt at London Irish for a long while, with Brian Smith at London Irish, and the way he's playing now shows he's got that bigger picture."

Stoicism, reliability, selflessness: Wilkinson brings it all back to this England XV. And modesty. "Often when people have said I had a good game, I've actually done nothing," he says. "All I've done is listen to the guy outside me and done what he said." He means the guy "inside" him, surely.